In case you’re wondering what I’ve been up to for the last few weeks, apart from eating tacos, I’ve been looking for an apartment. Again? Yes. I haven’t mentioned it here because I was kind of in denial, and then I hoped that if I just shut up and buckled down it would all be over faster, but that has unfortunately not been the case. This has been, by far, the most painful and grueling of my Parisian apartment-hunts to date. And it is ongoing. As in, we still haven’t found a place that we both like and is willing to rent to a couple of itinerant immigrants steadily-employed thirtysomethings. It is, quite frankly, baffling. And extremely frustrating. And a little scary, because we’re supposed to be out of this place in mid-April and are facing the very real possibility that we won’t find a place to rent before then and will have to put all our stuff in storage or sell it and sleep on someone’s couch until we find a place of our own. It is an unsavory thought.*

From time to time I wonder if we’re being too picky. But the conclusion I come to every time is no. A kitchen meant to reheat soup and frozen dinners from Picard is not going to cut it. An apartment that requires me to commute for an hour won’t either, because the Métro doesn’t run that early in the morning. And is it really so much to ask, in this, the supposed culinary capital of the world, that the kitchen accommodate someone who likes to cook and entertain? I think not.

Towards the end of our last apartment search, only a year ago, Nick suggested that it would have been interesting if I’d photographed the kitchens of the apartments we looked at to show people the gamut of Parisian apartment kitchens from the ghastly to the glorious. (By glorious I mean containing cupboards and/or shelves for storage of cooking equipment and food, a stove, oven, and refrigerator, and a bit of counter space. That is to say, a usable kitchen.) It didn’t happen then, but this time I was prepared. So without further ado, allow me to present to you the kitchens I’ve seen so far.